The directorial debut from Guillermo del Toro, (Hellboy, Blade II, The Devilâ€™s Backbone), Cronos won the Criticsâ€™ Week Award at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival before going on to win nine Mexican Academy Awards.

Combining a surreal and distinctive take on the classic vampire yarn with an allegory about US/Mexican relations, Cronos concerns elderly antique dealer JesÃºs Gris (Federico Lupi) who, with his eight-year-old granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath), discovers an ancient artifact that once belonged to a 16th-century alchemist. Unbeknownst to Gris, the device â€“ which resembles an ornate mechanical beetle â€“ houses an immortal parasite that will grant eternal life to its host. The cost? An extreme aversion to daylight and an agonising thirst for human blood. Hot on the trail of the device is a dying millionaire (Claudio Brook) and his brutish nephew (Ron Perlman, Hellboy).

Recently voted by Shivers magazine one of the best horror films in the history of cinema, Cronos is not only visually stunning (the effects, as befitting del Toroâ€™s training under make-up maestro Dick Smith are superb), but also blackly comic and scary as hell.